Decolonizing English

Broooooo
how do I decolonize English?
I don’t meant it in the warm and fuzzy way
but like
how can I pack John Brown and a big gun
in a paragraph?
How can poetry slam
like a bullet through Custer’s skull
fired from a European rifle
atop horses that were extinct
before the settler came?

To even say “decolonize” seems too soft
like putting Legos back together,
knocked over by a toddler we nicknamed
the Pale Devil
like it were cute.

Maybe it’s not to decolonize
but to indigenize
because to think of indigeneity
as genetic legacy and land claims,
bro that’s settler shit.
Bro, blood and soil is Nazi shit.
Take it from a German:
Blut und Boden ist Nazi Scheiße.

If you hear me when I tell you
indigeneity is not a matter of ancestry
but of ways of relating and knowing,
like knowing a continent as a comrade
for hundreds of thousands of years
past and future,
like Spaceship Earth blasting off
into time immemorial—
if you only hear it when I say it,
I wonder about all the times
you weren’t listening.
I wonder if I can trust you
to hold the path open all the way
from your ears to your heart.
I wonder if you will sit with that.

When my friend says,
“Socialism is all well and good
but have you considered potlatch?”
do I dump fifty thousands words on him
that all mean YES COMRADE I HAVE
or do I pick apart that he already thinks
potlatch has nothing to do with socialism
because obviously socialism is for settlers
and Jose Carlos Mariategui
must have just been flexing whiteness
when he described indigenous subjugation
as a matter of economic devastation,
of race as a colonial construct,
of borders as a wall except for capital,
of the Indian as a category of exemption,
of Westphalian land relation
as decivilizing?
Maybe to indigenize will be to civilize
but when you hear a pale face saying
“bro I want to civilize you”
I would say you have a right to bear arms
in self defense,
so unless you and I make Quechua
Turtle Island’s new lingua franca
then how do we decolonize English
so you understand who exactly
I am really threatening?